Moby Quotes

It seems so antithetical to the teachings of Christ to proclaim your faith in public. I mean, of course you're not supposed to hide your light under a bushel. ~ Moby

Whereas for me, touring tends to be a very strange and isolating experience. ~ Moby

'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world. ~ John Burnside

To choose one type of music at the exclusion of another would feel kind of sad and arbitrary. ~ Moby

Could you look an animal in the eyes and say to it, 'My appetite is more important than your suffering'? ~ Moby

For me to speak out against the war in Iraq, you know - most of my fans are lefties anyway, so I don't really get much flack for it. ~ Moby

There is a long and interesting tradition of really marginal left-field music that becomes commercially successful. And I will, for a brief minute, fit into that tradition. ~ Moby

I'm just fascinated with the world that I can see, but I'm even more fascinated with the world that I can't see. ~ Moby

I always feel kind of absurd and presumptuous presenting a speech. ~ Moby

I used to have a lot of envy for those musicians who have been universally loved. ~ Moby

Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright. ~ Moby

David Lynch is my friend, and I love his movies and his art and his music. Few things make me happier than working with him. ~ Moby

I've experienced tons of failure. I've been making music for 30 years, and I'd say failure and success have happened in equal measure. ~ Moby

His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw benieath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg. ~ Herman Melville

For me, New York still ranks as the most beautiful and the most interesting city in the world. It is also the most varied in terms of the things it has to offer. ~ Moby

When you're signed to a big label you're always in the position of convincing them, especially now because labels are barely keeping the lights on, so getting them to spend a little bit of money is really hard. ~ Moby

Sacha Baron Cohen is one of my heroes. ~ Moby

A vegan who beats his wife is far further down the ethical ladder than a meat eater who's kind to his children. ~ Moby

I've collaborated with artists that truly run the gamut: from members of the Wu Tang Clan and Capone, to Moby, Lady Gaga, and opening for artists such as Sheryl Crow, Jack White, and Chris Shiflett of the Foo Fighters, etc. ~ Wendy Starland

People have always been resistant to change. If you go back to the 17th, 18th century, playing guitar was frowned upon. When rock n' roll first started, no one took it seriously. ~ Moby

The reason I didn't like cocaine is it made me do stupid things, have stupid conversations, and stay awake until 11 o'clock in the morning unable to think, read, sleep or speak. ~ Moby

I'd much rather go out and have music randomly presented to me by different DJs than stay home and discover it on my own. ~ Moby

By the end of that summer in Ashcroft my father had nearly run out of stories. He'd almost read his father's full library and arrived at last at Moby Dick. The edition I have is a Penguin paperback (Book 2,333, Herman Melville, Penguin, London). It's been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul. Try it, you'll see. ~ Niall Williams

I'm like a monk with a taste for hookers. ~ Moby

Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick

One of the nice things about licensing music to movies or advertisements is you can reach a lot of people who normally wouldn't hear music. ~ Moby

Melville's Moby-Dick - ~ John Irving

If you care about women's rights, you can't not vote. ~ Moby

I think it'd be great if Prince made an album of just romantic, slow ballads. ~ Moby

I think we're like farm animals before an earthquake. ~ Moby

How do I transform pain. I guess the number one way in which I do that is by working on music, but also it can be anything from just talking about it with other people or doing kickboxing or meditating or running around with dogs. Or just simply trying to sit with it and be mindful and be aware of it. ~ Moby

But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence.
(Moby Dick Chapter lxxix p345) ~ Herman Melville

I'm not trying to look for pity or sympathy. I was just surprised that so many people in the world of entertainment seemed to be okay with misogyny and homophobia as long as they were profiting from it. ~ Moby

If you look at the history of popular music, the most successful musicians have started out being really marginal and esoteric. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Madonna. Prince. Bruce Springsteen. Fleetwood Mac. David Bowie. Public Enemy. Nirvana. ~ Moby

Let peace and beauty reign. ~ Moby

As a New Yorker you can't help but be proud of the fact that so much music and culture started here. Punk rock, jazz, hip-hop and house music started here, George Gershwin debuted 'Rhapsody in Blue' here; the Velvet Underground are from New York. ~ Moby

The strange thing about hotel rooms is that they look familiar and seem familiar and have many of the accoutrements that seem domestic and familiar, but they are really weird, alien and anonymous places. ~ Moby

It's perfectly natural for me to sit down and talk about meditating and spiritual practice with my friends. But then I realize, how would it sound to a drunk cynical guy in London? ~ Moby

Whenever I've had success, I never learn from it. Success usually breeds a degree of hubris. When you fail, that's when you learn. ~ Moby

When I dj at big venues I try to play tracks that I would want to hear if I were e'd up in a field with 50,000 other people. ~ Moby

I have actually found myself buying up more and more old analogue gear. I have this strange obsession with old drum machines. ~ Moby

I will have no man in my boat," said Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a whale." By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
(moby dick chap 26 p112) ~ Herman Melville

It's much easier to have a diversified career as an electronic musician than it is as a drummer. Nothing against drummers. If you're a drummer, you just wait around for people to ask you to play drums. But if you have your own studio and can make music, you have the ability to approach music a lot differently. ~ Moby

I don't think I talk to anybody the same way I talk to Moby. ~ Damian Loeb

Better a loving single-parent family than a 'conventional' family where the parents hate each other and the father is a demagogue. ~ Moby

Whether the Virgin Mary existed, I don't know. But the human need for her to appear in tortilla, that's what inspires my interest. ~ Moby

Not to me," I said.
Kafka wrote his first story in one night. Stendhal wrote The
Charterhouse of Parma in forty-nine days. Melville wrote Moby-
Dick in sixteen months. Flaubert spent five years on Madame
Bovary. Musil worked for eighteen years on The Man Without
Qualities and died before he could finish. Do we care about any
of that now? ~ Paul Auster

My reason for becoming a vegetarian was simple: I loved (and love) animals ~ Moby

I don't know many artists who are happy with themselves all of the time. ~ Moby

Many, many of my paintings have come from the first chapter of Moby Dick. ~ Robert Indiana

For my most of my career I've been a falling-down drunk. Most of my interviews were done hungover, and for a while it was great. ~ Moby

When I was young, I kept trying to read 'Moby-Dick', and I couldn't get that far into it. And I kept thinking, 'Well, man, if I can't read the great American novel, I could never be a writer.' And this bothered me a great deal. ~ Nick Tosches

As long as the world continues to be strange and interesting, I still want to take pictures of it. ~ Moby

I sort of use as my guiding principle that show The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Whenever possible, do the stupid thing. ~ Moby

In a perfect world, I would be 6-foot-3 and have a perfect head of hair and look like Orlando Bloom. ~ Moby

One of the problems with being relatively conscious and human is that you want to help everybody. ~ Moby

I'm a weird, bald musician who makes records in his bedroom and lives in the Lower East Side. ~ Moby

If the entire world decided to become vegan tomorrow, a whole host of the world's problems would disappear overnight. Climate change would decrease by 25 percent, deforestation would cease, rainforests would be preserved, our water- and air-quality would increase, life-expectancy rates would increase, and our rates of cancer would plummet, so certainly, with that one action of becoming vegan you are quite effectively making the world a better place. ~ Moby

If you could decide on characters' destinies it would be like going to the desk of a travel agent who says: So where do you want to find the whale, in Samoa or in the Aleutian Islands? And when? And do you want to be the one who kills it or let Queequeg do it? Whereas the real lesson of Moby-Dick is that the whale goes wherever it wants. ~ Umberto Eco

When facing a difficult task, act as though it is impossible to fail. If you are going after Moby Dick, take along the tartar sauce. ~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

I would drink and drink and then at 3 o'clock in the morning take anything that was put in front of me. And I'd sometimes be disappointed when conventional things were put in front of me. Like, I'd do a line of something and be disappointed to find it was just cocaine. ~ Moby

There's really no reason for any musician, writer, actor to ever take themselves seriously. If you work in a needle exchange, take yourself seriously. You're doing good work. If you're involved in hostage negotiations and saving lives, you can have a sense of entitlement. ~ Moby

That softness around your eyes, a softness in your face. Almost the way you feel when you're about to start crying. That, to me, is love. It can be romantic love, it can be friendship love, it can be family love, it can be love for a chipmunk. It can be love for anything. ~ Moby

I don't put a lot of pressure on myself when I'm writing. It feels like if I come up with something good, or I come up with something bad, I'm not too worried. ~ Moby

I was on food stamps until I was 18 and became an adult. ~ Moby

Some of the songs I've made, I'm really disappointed in how I mixed them. ~ Moby

Moby-Dick is a long, grueling, convoluted graft. And yet, as soon as I completed it, once I could hold it at arm's length and admire its intricacy and design, I knew Moby-Dick was obviously, uncannily, a masterwork. It wormed into my subconsious; I dreamed about it for nights afterwards. Whereas when I finished The Da Vinci Code, which had taken little less than twelve hours from cover to cover, I chicked it aside and thought: wow - I really ought to read something good. ~ Andy Miller

I feel like the vast majority of the world's problems would disappear if suddenly everyone on the planet were relatively self-aware and capable of honest self-love and compassion. ~ Moby

I'd just rather have a really sharp, interesting, smart gay son than some big dumb hetero meathead. ~ Moby

When I was growing up, albums were my closest friends, as sad as that may sound - Joy Division's 'Closer,' or Echo and the Bunnymen's 'Heaven Up Here' ... I had a more intimate relationship with those records than I did with most of the people in my life. ~ Moby

I'm like a bad musical cliche because I bring my guitar on the road and try to write songs in hotel rooms. ~ Moby

I spent so much of my life reading about spirituality and reading about neuroscience and trying different meditation practices. It's a really big part of my life. But it's sometimes hard to talk about. There are so many people in the world who don't live in Southern California and don't spend their time meditating. ~ Moby

The thing about Moby Dick is that, at heart, it's a very simple plot - there's only one white whale in the ocean. When you're a boy growing up in a hostile home, you imagine it's unique: it's happening only to you. ~ Gavin O'Connor

I remember New York in the '80s as a place with vacant lots that would eventually give over to nature. Weeds would grow up, squirrels would move in. That entropy is gone now. It's too expensive to let a vacant lot go natural. ~ Moby

I'm sure most people have this experience: when you're young you drink, you do drugs, you stay up late, and there are no consequences. ~ Moby

I realized the universe is 15 billion years old and unspeakably complicated. I still love the teachings of Christ, but I also believe that the human condition prevents us from having any true objective knowledge and understanding of the universe. ~ Moby

I truly believe, as an institution, most major labels should just die. ~ Moby

People who meditate and have a good spiritual practice, their immune systems are stronger. Generally, they are happier and healthier. ~ Moby

There are so many musicians, friends of mine, who play shows for ten people a night, or always desperately wanted a record contract. So even if every person on the planet loathes me, I have nothing to complain about. My job is not a bad job, so I can't complain. ~ Moby

I'm offended by the is-ought fallacy, which has been used to justify slavery, women not being allowed to vote, children working in factories. ~ Moby

This whole world is run by brutes for the common and the stupid. ~ Moby

I've been making electronic music for twenty some odd years but, because I grew up playing in punk rock bands, when I started touring, I thought in order to be a viable touring musician I had to do it with a band. I would DJ or tour with a full rock band. ~ Moby

With the motto "do what you will," Rabelais gave himself permission to do anything he damn well pleased with the language and the form of the novel; as a result, every author of an innovative novel mixing literary forms and genres in an extravagant style is indebted to Rabelais, directly or indirectly. Out of his codpiece came Aneau's Alector, Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller, López de Úbeda's Justina, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Béroalde de Verville's Fantastic Tales, Sorel's Francion, Burton's Anatomy, Swift's Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, Fielding's Tom Jones, Amory's John Buncle, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the novels of Diderot and maybe Voltaire (a late convert), Smollett's Adventures of an Atom, Hoffmann's Tomcat Murr, Hugo's Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Southey's Doctor, Melville's Moby-Dick, Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Pecuchet, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frederick Rolfe's ornate novels, Bely's Petersburg, Joyce's Ulysses, Witkiewicz's Polish jokes, Flann O'Brien's Irish farces, Philip Wylie's Finnley Wren, Patchen's tender novels, Burroughs's and Kerouac's mad ones, Nabokov's later works, Schmidt's fiction, the novels of Durrell, Burgess (especially A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers), Gaddis and Pynchon, Barth, Coover, Sorrentino, Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Brossard's later works, the masterpieces of Latin American magic realism (Paradiso, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Three Trapped Tigers, I the Supreme, Avalovara, Terra Nostra, Palin ~ Steven Moore

Music is just air moving around. ~ Moby

When I say, 'I love Christ and love the teachings of Christ,' I mean that in the most simple and naive way. I'm not saying I'm right. ~ Moby

If I'm walking down the street and someone stops me and says, "Oh! A song that you wrote meant a lot to me, and I listened to it after I went to my sister's funeral," that's when it hits me. ~ Moby

Rad had written a two-sentence response for his comparison/contrast between Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea:

"The fishermen lost their fish, and that was IT. Nothing to write books about, and the 'literary devices' you want listed are nothing but made-up complications for a useless major. ~ Emm Oh

When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco... Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission - his life. ...

Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book... was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence... it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded - Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer - everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book - it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things."

But if this is what a book is... then a library is an extraordinary thing. ...

The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. ... It asserts that... all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. ...

The library, almost alone of the g ~ Archibald MacLeish

To truly live a creative life means that you will need to experiment in as many different fields as possible. ~ Moby

Luckily almost no one buys music anymore, so selling music doesn't really affect any of my professional decisions. ~ Moby

To quote Homer Simpson, alcohol is the cause and solution to all of life's problems. I don't think there's anything wrong with drinking and drug use, if people can do it and not hurt themselves. But it got to the point where I was really hurting myself. ~ Moby

When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands. ~ Moby

The midlife crisis you're having at 30 is indulgent, but the midlife crisis you have at 45 is to an extent thrust upon you. ~ Moby

Suffice it to say I was compelled to create this group in order to find everyone who is, let's say, borrowing liberally from my INESTIMABLE FOLIO OF CANONICAL MASTERPIECES (sorry, I just do that sometimes), and get you all together. It's the least I could do.

I mean, seriously. Those soliloquies in Moby-Dick? Sooo Hamlet and/or Othello, with maybe a little Shylock thrown in. Everyone from Pip in Great Expectations to freakin' Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre mentions my plays, sometimes completely mangling my words in nineteenth-century middle-American dialect for humorous effect (thank you, Sir Clemens). Many people (cough Virginia Woolf cough) just quote me over and over again without attribution. I hear James Joyce even devoted a chapter of his giant novel to something called the "Hamlet theory," though do you have some sort of newfangled English? It looks like gobbledygook to me. The only people who don't seek me out are like Chaucer and Dante and those ancient Greeks. For whatever reason.

And then there are the titles. The Sound and the Fury? Mine. Infinite Jest? Mine. Proust, Nabokov, Steinbeck, and Agatha Christie all have titles that are me-inspired. Brave New World? Not just the title, but half the plot has to do with my work. Even Edgar Allan Poe named a character after my Tempest's Prospero (though, not surprisingly, things didn't turn out well for him!). I'm like the star to every wandering bark, the arrow of every compass, the buzzard to every haw ~ Sarah Schmelling

You could spend every waking moment online and still only experience one-trillionth of what's out there. I find that a little overwhelming. ~ Moby

New York has inspired more remarkable music than any other city I can think of. ~ Moby

I hear the Sophie Giraffe is great for teething. Another thing I really love right now is the Moby Baby Carrier. To me, it seems like a natural way to hold the baby close to you. I also love the burp cloths, bibs, and swaddle blankets from Aden and Anais. Their stuff is organic and pure. ~ Vanessa Lachey

One can only snort so many ants and have so much sex before one starts to long for the comfort and companionship of a good book. ~ Moby

For me the two biggest issues are climate change and animal welfare/animal agriculture. And oddly enough animal agriculture is such a contributor to climate change. According to the United Nations, 25% of climate change comes from animal agriculture, so every car, bus, boat, truck, airplane combined has less CO2 and methane emissions than animal agriculture. ~ Moby

Personally I find the democratic chaos of the Internet fascinating, and for the most part really benign. ~ Moby